Friday, May 8, 2015

As I've worked with customers deploying Recoverpoint for VMs pilots in their environment I've put together a small "pre-flight" checklist to help people jumpstart their deployment. Several customers got stalled in the process, not because the product is difficult to install, but because they weren't aware of all of the IP address requirements and needed to go back to the network team.

If you aren't aware Recoverpoint for Virtual Machines is a storage agnostic version of EMC's Recoverpoint. Recoverpoint provides the ability to rewind a system to a specific point in time, as well as remote replication of the changes. Both Recoverpoint (for storage arrays) and Recoverpoint for VMs leverage a journal volume for all writes to provide this point in time recovery ability.

The key difference between Recoverpoint for VMs and the array based products is the location of the write splitter. In the array based product writes are split to the journal volume in the array, meaning than individual LUNs become the level of granularity. With Recoverpoint for VMs writes are split to the journal volume in the ESXi host, meaning that granularity is moved all the way to the VM level. This level of granularity allows you to replicate some VMs on a datastore without having to replicate all, and by the way it is completely storage agnostic working on any array or even local disk.

Did I mention it's even free? Recoverpoint for VMs can be freely downloaded from EMC, and all features used without time limits. Test to your hearts content, then buy support if you want to take it into production.

About Me

vSpecialist at EMC. VCAP-DCA / VCAP-DCD. I work for EMC but these opinions are my own. My primary focus is virtualization and data center networking. I have a loving wife, two small children, and a home in the burbs.